Gary H. Bernstein received his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, with honors, in 1979 and master's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University, W. Lafayette, Indiana, in 1981. During the summers of 1979 and 1980, he was a graduate assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and in the summer of 1983 interned at the Motorola Semiconductor Research and Development Laboratory, Phoenix, Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, in 1987, after which he spent a year there as a postdoctoral fellow.

He joined the department of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1988 as an assistant professor, and was the founding director of the Notre Dame Nanoelectronics Facility (NDNF) from 1989 to 1998. Dr. Bernstein received an NSF White House Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1992. Promoted to rank of professor in 1998, he served as associate chairman from 1999 to 2006. Bernstein was named the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2010, and currently serves as the associate director of the Notre Dame Center for Nano Science and Technology (NDnano).

Bernstein was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2006. As co-author, he received the Sensors and Transducers Journal 2006 award for Best Paper of the Year. As lead author for research on high-performance electronic packaging, he and his group received the 2007 award for Best Paper of the Year from IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging. In 2014, he received the inaugural Indiana Master of Innovation Award from the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and Forbes Inc., and in 2016 received the 1st Source Bank Commercialization Award, both for his “Quilt Packaging®” microchip packing technology. Bernstein is cofounder of Indiana Integrated Circuits, LLC based in South Bend, Indiana.